Arriving on Blu-ray in time for Father’s Day, a
pair of recent Sony Pictures Home Entertainment releases offer valentines to
American heroism and manly virtues in solid genre pieces — one a war movie, the
other an action flick. Both movies are also available on standard DVD.

The
popular, rousing Civil War movie Glory has the distinction of being the first major
Hollywood film to focus on the role of black soldiers in the war between the
States.

Nearly
two decades before Spike Lee’s Miracle at
St. Anna gave similar attention
to the all-black Buffalo Soldiers of WWII, Glory
highlighted the travails of the all-black 54th Regiment of Massachusetts
Volunteer Infantry.

Denzel
Washington won his first Oscar as a runaway slave who serves under Col. Robert
Shaw (miscast Matthew Broderick), a white abolitionist who commands the 54th.

While
battlefield conditions are excruciatingly realized, it’s still Hollywood
formula, but director Edward Zwick wraps that formula in glowing images and
heartfelt sentiment.

Air Force One is a sort of last hurrah for Harrison Ford, action
hero. Ford plays a Clancyesque can-do American president who finds himself in a
mind-boggling worst-case scenario: hijacked by terrorists aboard his own
presidential jet. (Ford’s Jack Ryan never made it to the White House, like the
character did in Clancy’s Executive
Orders, but AF1 offers a
taste of what he would have been like.)

After
Speed, AF1 is probably the most watchable of the Die Hard
clones, in part because it’s the only film in the genre to offer a hero who,
like John McClane, is overwhelmed and out of his league. With Gary Oldman as a
Russian terrorist, AF1 has the grace never to take itself too seriously.

Ford
also appears in the new Blu-ray release Lost Worlds: Life in the Balance, albeit only as narrator. A 40-minute Imax documentary from Razor
Entertainment, Lost Worlds (also available on standard DVD) makes a
worthwhile companion piece to Pixar’s current hit Up.

That’s
because Up is set in the “Lost World” of Venezuela, the tepui
(tabletop mountain) highlands of the Guiana Shield. Lost Worlds takes
you to the real Venezuelan Lost World, among other destinations — a journey
that the Pixar team took in person in preparation for Up.

Trading
on Ford’s iconic image, Lost Worlds initially evokes Raiders
with images of the Mayan ruins of Tikal in Guatemala. It’s a bit of bait and
switch, though, since Lost Worlds’ real interest is not ancient civilizations, but
the balance of the biosphere and the loss of natural habitats.

Though
preachy, the environmentalist message is basically sound, but the spectacular
photography and the harsh beauty of the mesui
highlands celebrated in Up are the real draws.